The present invention relates generally to the field of navigation systems, and more particularly to re-routing traffic around routes traveled by emergency services to an emergency situation and an emergency treatment provider.
Telematics is an interdisciplinary field that encompasses telecommunications, vehicular technologies, road transportation, road safety, electrical engineering (e.g., sensors, instrumentation, wireless communications, etc.), and computer science (e.g., multimedia, Internet, etc.). For example, vehicle telematics encompasses emergency warning systems, GPS navigation, integrated hands-free cell phones, wireless safety communications, and automatic driving assistance systems. Advanced automatic crash notification (AACN) or automatic collision notification are vehicle telemetric systems that utilize data from crash sensors and sends crash data to an advisor indicating a vehicle is involved in an accident. Crash sensors collect the data pertaining to airbag and deployment, how quickly a vehicle decelerates (e.g., frontal collision), accelerates (e.g., side impact collision), and the onset of a vehicle rollover. Based on the collected data, the AACN, notifies the advisor (e.g., call center) through an embedded modem or mobile device connected to the vehicle, in-order to summon assistance. AACN(s) also include Good Samaritan assistance that allows drivers of vehicles that view an accident or emergency to summon assistance on the behalf of others.
As technology advances, the manner in which individuals navigate to a destination has evolved. Driverless cars, also known as a self-driving car, an automated car or an autonomous vehicle, are robotic vehicles designed to travel between destinations without a human operator. To be fully autonomous, a vehicle must be able to navigate without human intervention to a predetermined destination over roads that have not been adapted for use by the autonomous vehicle. The navigation system within a driverless vehicle calculates a route to a set destination and begins driving to the destination. As the driverless vehicle proceeds along the route, sensors monitor the environment around the driverless vehicle in addition to the movement of the driverless vehicle with respect to the environment. The artificial intelligence of the driverless vehicle simulates human perception and decision making in order to control the actions associated with the driverless vehicle.
Regardless of the type of vehicle, manned or driverless, route planning software designs an optimal route between two geographic locations (e.g., origin and destination, start point and end point, etc.) using a journey planning engine. The journey planning engine suggests one or more routes between the origin and destination that may be optimized for different criteria (e.g., fastest, shortest, least turns, toll roads, expressways, etc.) and marks the routes within an interactive map. The integration of the route planning software into global positioning systems (GPS) and portable navigation systems, allows the combination of positioning capabilities (e.g., GPS) and navigation functions, in order to monitor and control the movement of a vehicle from one location to another along the route. The navigation systems receives signals from satellites through a GPS antenna and combines the data from the satellites with the information received from onboard sensors (e.g., direction sensor, speed sensor, etc.) to identify the position and direction of the vehicle on the route. The navigation system displays the current position and direction of the vehicle on a visual output device (e.g., handheld, embedded console screen, etc.) with respect to the route, and updates the route and electronic maps real time, until reaching the destination.